


Can't Stop Won't Stop

by Corvid_Knight



Category: Homestuck
Genre: I Don't Even Know, M/M, Suicidal Thoughts, my tumblr is knight-of-heart-and-art, old fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-20
Updated: 2018-03-20
Packaged: 2019-04-05 00:09:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14031870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Corvid_Knight/pseuds/Corvid_Knight
Summary: Hoo boy.Instead of an attempt at a real summary, I'm just going to say a couple things here. One, this is an old fic. Either the second or third homestuck thing I ever wrote. Two, this was written when I was in maybe the shittiest mental state I've ever been in, so like. It's kind of straight out wish fulfillment ("hey I hate my life love me" kind of thing.) (Also I swear things have gotten a hell of a lot better since I wrote this. Like. Don't worry.)There's self-harm in this.There's also a rare instance of me writing Dave rapping. I'm still very proud of that even if it sucks.Nobody dies and there's no blood spilt. I promise.





	Can't Stop Won't Stop

 You are DAVE STRIDER. You're alone in your room, in the dark but for the glow of your computer screen. You're still wearing your shades, though—you always wear the shades, partly because your best bro John gave them to you, partly because you don't like people to see your eyes, and partly because your eyes are hella sensitive to light. Of course, if anyone asks, you wear them because you are the coolest dude on earth. 

 Not that that's saying much anymore. You, John, Dirk (not your Bro, no matter how much he looks and talks and acts like your Bro he's not), and Jake are probably the last male humans in this universe. And it's your fault, isn't it? You started the game that ended the world. 

 You push your shades up onto your forehead, rub your eyes, and settle them back into place again. 

 John's called you a hero, but you're...

 You started the game. 

 You were too afraid to kill your own sleeping self and go godtier. 

 You were too slow and weak to help your Bro. 

 You started the game, and that's the one that repeats in your head, all the splintered versions of yourself murmuring it because in everything that you've done that's the thing that haunts you. You invited John into this, you entered as his server player, you were the one who didn't see the danger until it was too late, you were the one who ended the world. You were the one who killed everyone, really, John's dad and Rose's mom and your own Bro, and everything that followed was a result of what you did. 

 You are anything but a hero. 

 You shake off the dark thoughts, for a moment at least, and open a new tab in your browser, pulling up the question forum where you left a question. It was simple enough: Is suicide considered either Heroic or Just? In other words, if you're godtier and you kill yourself, will it take? 

 You went full-on anonymous. Plain black text, no username or anything. Nothing to show who you are. 

 There's a reply. Five words, in off-yellow text: dont bee a fuckiing iidiiot. 

 You stare at the words for a moment, then type in a placating reply:  It's just a question. Don't get all uptight, dude. 

 You know who uses that color and quirk, but this forum seems to exist in a half-dozen timelines at once, and you've gotten answers from past and future versions of your friends before, so it might not be exactly who you think it is. 

 Before you even finish that thought, another message comes up:  ii'm not beeing uptiight, youre beeing 2tupiid. death fuckiing hurt2, and the people you leave beehiind get hurt even wor2e. 

 Your fingers move across the keyboard, spelling out your thoughts and hitting the enter key before you can think about what you're saying:  I deserve it, death can't hurt any more than living does, and no one cares enough to be hurt when I do it. 

 Reading your words onscreen, you realize that you wrote "when" instead of "if." It's really the first time that you admitted, even to yourself, that you're going to go through with this. 

 While you're still considering that admission, more words come up:  2top. just 2top, ok? ii dont care how much you thiink people hate you. even iif you think there i2 no one out there who care2, there ii2 2omeone, 2omewhere, who wiill cry when youre gone. dont you fuckiing dare hurt your2elf, 2triider. 

 You puzzle over the last word for a minute before you see that it's supposed to be your name. When you get it, you freeze for a second, then type:  I'm not Strider. I don't know who you're talking about. 

 This time the reply comes back almost immediately:  come on dude. we both know ii'm capable of traciing you back, and you diidnt exactly cover your track2. and ii mean what ii 2aiid. iif your hurt your2elf, youre hurtiing everyone who know2 you, and ii'm countiing my2elf iin that. ii dont have enough friiend2 to lo2e another one, dave. 

 "Damn it," you mutter. "Don't make this about you, Sollux." You type in:  You don't know me. 

 You're about to close the tab and shut down your computer for the night, but before you can move the cursor to the X, another message comes up:  2triider, ii know you better than ii know my be2t friiend. ii know what iit'2 liike to know that your friiend2 are goiing to diie, and have to 2tand iidly by and do nothiing. ii know what it'2 like to 2ee your lu2u2—or parent, whatever—diie in front of you. ii know about your brother, ii know you thiink you kiiled hiim, and ii'm here to tell you that you diidnt. 

 You hit each key deliberately, but not as hard as you want to: dont talk about bro to me. 

 You wait for the answer this time, and it does come:  you diid nothiing wrong. there wa2 nothing any of u2 could have done to 2ave hiim. to 2ave any of them. ii know, dave. 

 Your lip hurts from how hard you're chewing on it. It's a stupid nervous habit that Bro trained you out of when you were ten, and you've only started doing it again since he's been gone. You type: Shut up. You don't know anything about it, you weren't there. 

 The screen stays static after your text comes up, and you stare at it, biting your lip and praying that no more yellow text will come up, that you'll reach the point when you can shut down the computer and walk away. You think of walking into the bathroom, opening the cabinet in the dark and reaching up to the back of the top shelf, feeling around for the still-sealed box of razor blades—

 But more words are appearing, under your last ones: ii kiilled my mate2priit wiith my own hands. my lu2u2 diied a2 ii watched. the giirl that could have been my mate2priit 2tepped iin front me and diied takiing a hiit that wa2 2uppo2ed to kiil me. ii wa2 almo2t 2 where you are now, and iit took a hell of a lot of repiitiion2 for my friiend2 2 get thii2 through my thiick 2kull: no matter what you diid or thiink you diid, you dont get to pa22 judgement on your2elf. you are not your own judge, jaiilor, and executiioner. you are not. 

 You stare at the screen. You honestly don't know what to say to that, what arguements you could use, because half of you can see the truth there. 

 After a moment, more words come up:  2triider? you 2tiill there? 

 "How can you know me this well?" you ask, leaning back and pulling your shades off, letting them dangle loosely from one hand, and in the same breath you say, "You don't know shit." 

 More yellow text comes up:  goddammiit 2triider

 "I killed everyone," you say, and every bit of your soul believes that statement. You let the shades slip out of your fingers, onto the floor, as you tip the chair back, finding perfect equilibrium and balancing it on two legs. "Every one of my friends, over and over again." 

 And more: dave fuckiing an2wer me 

 "I'm worse than useless." You close your eyes. "When I die, at least I can't kill them again." 

 You'll get up. In a minute, and you do mean in a minute, but suddenly you're tired and you want to sit for a sec. When you get up, you'll go into the bathroom. No need for the lights—you know where what you need is, and you know where the shower is. You can turn the shower on in the dark, that'll wash most of the blood away and make it a little less disgusting for whoever finds you. 

 Someone shouts—a hoarse inarticulate battle cry—and, from the sound of it, slams a battering ram into your door. Startled, you overbalance the chair. "Shit—" You swallow the rest of the sentence as you hit the floor, bite your lip, and taste blood. 

 The door's locked, but whoever's pounding on it doesn't seem to care, and after a second blow something splinters. For a moment, even the low light from the hallway is too bright, and you have to blink a few times before you can recognise who it is in your doorway. 

 Whoever it is short and dark, with nubby horns that almost hide under the artfully messy black hair. Karkat Vantas, you realize a moment before he starts shouting. 

 "Strider! Fucking answer me!" He sounds angry, he always sounds angry, but there's a current of worry underneath the anger that you've never heard from him before. "Dave!" 

 "Did you just break my door down?" You sit up, fingering your lip. It hurts, and there's blood staining your fingers when you take your hand away. "Haven't you heard of knocking?" 

 "You—" Karkat looks past you, higher than your head. At the computer screen behind you. "Fuck..." And he strides across the room and kneels next to you. "Sollux messaged me. He said he was afraid you were going to do something stupid." 

 "I'm fine." It's a lie, you can hear how bad a lie it is as you say it. You fumble around on the floor, looking for your shades in the faint light from the hall and from your computer. After a second, your hand brushes against them, and you scoop them up. Before you can put them back on, Karkat snatches them out of your hand. 

 "Don't you fucking lie," he growls, reaching back and setting them on the desk, out of your reach. "Don't you distance yourself like that. What the fuck are you thinking? You can't just die, it doesn't work like that. How the fuck do you think the rest of us are going to feel?" 

 You wipe your mouth again, and look at the faint streak of red instead of at Karkat. "I'm the reason you can count 'the rest of us' on your fingers," you point out quietly. "You'd be better off—" 

 "Fucking nooksniffer bulgebrain wriggler," Karkat mutters, and puts his hands on your head, the hollows of his palms at your temples. He pulls your head up, forcing you to meet his strange eyes, shockingly yellow and black with no sclera, framed by shadows darker than his grey skin. His hands are warm, further reminding you how alien he is. "Stop talking like you're fucking expendable. You're a person, not some piece in some cosmic fucking game, and you're not fucking killing yourself." 

 "I—" You have some arguement, you have it half-planned in your mind, but he runs his hands upward through your hair, like you're some small animal he's petting, and the strangeness of it—the amazing gentleness of his hands, so much at odds with his anger—drives everything else out of your head. 

 Karkat makes a noise that isn't anything like a word, just a incoherent expression of anger. "What do you humans even do without horns?" he mutters. "I don't fucking get how you people calm each other down. I...fuck." He takes his hands out of your hair—you find yourself oddly sad about that—and sits back on his heels, dragging one arm across his face. When he takes it away, you realize that he's close to tears. "I'm no fucking good at this shit," he says, reaching out with one sharp-nailed finger and wiping a last bit of blood off your lips. "I got fucking lucky last time, one time, and now Sol texts me...he knows how I feel about you, he knows I couldn't stay away and let you..."

 "Wh-what?" Something about him is incredibly calming, it always is, even when he's shouting; it's like he's some soothing drug, making you feel like everything is almost all right. But sometimes, you find yourself listening to his voice so closely that you miss what words he's saying. He can't have implied what you inferred. "I don't—" 

 "You need a moirail, or a fucking matesprit," Karkat says bluntly, "and I wish it was me. And don't give me that 'not a homosexual' shit—number one, it doesn't make any fucking sense, and number two, I've seen how you look at Egbert." He shakes his head, meeting your eyes for a second and then looking down. "You...fuck, I don't know." 

 "I...this isn't about John. None of this is about him." You feel your face heating up, a blush that you know lights your albino skin like a traffic light. Karkat's right: you look at John, when he's not paying attention, and you had a crush on him, when you met him and before you met him, and you love him and always will, like a brother. But he isn't interested in you as anything else, and you know it, and the peeks that you sneak add up to nothing more than one more guilt to be thrown upon a pile already sky-high. "I never said I was straight—"

 "I don't know what that means." Karkat shrugs. 

 "It means..." Staring at his lowered head, you get an urge to touch him, to feel the heat of his skin, and instead of finishing your sentence, instead of thinking of all the reasons you shouldn't, you reach out and run your fingers through his black hair. It's soft and a little tangled, and as you move your fingers you brush against one of his stubby horns. 

 Karkat makes a sound like a soft growl, deep in his throat, and his eyes snap up to meet yours. There's pain on his face, pain and sorrow and fear and hope and desire all snarled up together. He reaches out, laying his hands gently against your head again, letting his fingers get tangled in your white hair. He closes his eyes, growling so softly that it can't be called a growl, so softly that he isn't growling, he's...he's purring. 

 "Karkat," you say, connecting the noise that he's making with his name and forgetting everything in your life except this ridiculous coincidence, this lingual joke across two universes. "Karkat, like a fucking cat, you're a cat, oh my god—" 

 Karkat lets you go, brushing off your hands as you start to laugh. Fifteen minutes ago you were alone in this room, ready to end everything and force a personal game over, and now you're laughing at a dumb pun that no one in particular created. And that thought makes you laugh harder. 

 "You really know how to ruin the moment," Karkat grumbles, crossing his arms and looking away from you. 

 You're still laughing as you lean forward, put one hand under his chin to turn his face to you, and kiss him. 

 He hesitates for a second, barely long enough for you to fear that you're wrong to do this—and then he wraps his arms around you, pulling you closer and kissing you back. 

 Karkat tastes like salt and sweetness, like something foreign and exotic, something that you've been looking for your entire life and never found before now. His teeth are smooth as you run your tongue across them, nubby like his horns but wickedly sharp, sharp enough to make you feel like you're on the verge of cutting your tongue, that kissing him is flirting with danger like you'd love to flirt with him. He's growling—or purring—again, and it feels like your head is resonating with it, with him. 

 You slip your hands up under his shirt, touching his skin. Sliding your hands across his chest, feeling the ridges of his ribs, his heart beating faster than yours ever could. 

 Karkat moans, exhaling into your mouth, then pulls away. He doesn't let go of you, though. "Wait," he says, and you get an unreasonable flash of pride at how out-of-breath he sounds. "No...no pailing, okay? Not tonight. You...you need something to look forward to, and you need to sleep." 

 He shifts his grip as you're parsing that sentence, then stands up, lifting you like you weigh next to nothing. The pure shock of it holds you still for a moment—he's tiny, he barely comes up to your shoulders, how can he pick you up this easily?—and then you twist in his arms. "Karkat, c'mon, put me down—" 

 "Would you fucking cooperate?" The door to your bedroom is ajar; Karkat kicks it open and carries you through, depositing you unceremoniously on the bed. "There; you're down." He flicks on the light, then pulls his shirt off over his head, folding it in a few quick motions and laying it on top of your dresser. 

 "What are you doing?" You sit up, flicking hair out of your eyes. 

 "You think I'm gonna leave you alone?" Karkat glares at you, crossing his arms defensively in front of his chest. "And come back tomorrow morning, and find you fucking dead? No fucking way. Move over." 

 You don't, but he sits down on the bed anyway. 

 "Karkat—" You stop yourself. Take a deep breath, hold it for a second, let it out again. You don't know why you're arguing with him; you don't want him to go. "Okay." 

 And you do something that you wouldn't do if it were someone else sitting there, if it were John or Dirk or fucking anyone but Karkat—or if you hadn't seen the oh-so-faint scars covering his chest and back like spiderwebs, only a shade paler than his grey skin. You pull your shirt off, wadding it into a ball and tossing it off the end of the bed. It takes all of your self-control to keep your hands at your sides, to not cross your arms and try to hide what's on your skin. 

 "Wow." Karkat's tone is soft, not pitying but maybe a bit sad. He touches you lightly with one long-nailed finger, starting at your shoulder and following the tracery downward. "What are they from?" 

 Usually, you don't talk about your scars. Usually, you don't even admit they exist. Now, you take Karkat's hand and guide it to the worst and most noticable one, the thick vertical line dead center of your chest. "This one's from Jack Noir. When he...stabbed me. Killed me." You move his hand upward, to one running diagonally across your shoulder. This one's thinner, but longer as well, and you can still remember when it happened. "This one, I was sparring with Bro, and one of us fucked up. Probably me." To the other side, lower, a horizontal cut that's faded to almost nothing. "The first time I ever practiced with Bro, I didn't realize that blades bounce, and he...he didn't know I wouldn't know that." 

 Karkat pulls his hand down to your stomach, brushing his fingers against the close-set ladderwork of horizontal scars there. "How about these?" His voice is unspeakably gentle, so much so that he doesn't sound like the Karkat you know, and you know he already knows the answer to the question. 

 "Those—" You have to stop for a second. You've never admitted this, not to anyone, and as far as you know no one knows. "Me. Those are from me, okay?" 

 Every one of those cuts is for a memory of your Bro. After he died, after you knew he was gone, you sat in the dark and you went through your mind, searching out reasons you shouldn't miss him. For every one you found, you cut another line into your skin. 

 There were so many reasons. 

 When you turned the light on, you were kind of surprised by how much blood there was. 

 You're shaking. 

 Karkat growls in what sounds like annoyance, and stands up. You watch him, afraid that he's going to leave but somehow unable to call him back. 

 He steps over to the light switch and flicks it off. Your night vision is awful, and as soon as the room goes dark you are, effectively, blind, but you can hear the mattress creak as he sits down. 

 "Lie down, Dave." That strange gentleness is still in his voice, and as soon as you do what he says he rolls over next to you, putting one arm across your chest like an anchor. 

 "I'm sorry," you whisper, and you don't even know what you're apologising for. 

 "You didn't do anything wrong. It's okay. Go to sleep." 

 "I love you." You don't know why you say that. It's true, but you've never said it to anyone before, not that you can remember; you've always been too afraid to say it. 

 "Yeah. I love you, too, if it means what I think it does." Karkat sighs. "Go the fuck to sleep, Dave." 

 And you close your eyes, and you fall asleep, with Karkat lying warmly against you. 

* * *

 You are KARKAT VANTAS, and you can see a little better that Dave can in this darkness, which is to say that you can just make out vague shapes. You watch Dave in the dark, feeling the rythm of his breath slow and stabilize, fall into a calm pattern. He's asleep now, and you can stop worrying. For a minute, at least. 

 You're not going to leave him here. You're not going to go to sleep, either. Ever since this game started, ever since you first loaded that fucking game into your computer, you've been plagued with intense nightmares. Even before this all started, you had trouble sleeping sometimes; now that you're almost afraid of what waits for you in your dreams, you often stay awake until you physically can't keep your eyes open any longer. 

 And you don't like human-style beds all that much. Recupracoons make so much more sense. 

 You run your fingers across Dave's scars again, lightly enough that you won't wake him, starting with the worst one—Jack's—and working your way outward in a widening spiral. His scars show up so much worse than yours—human skin must not heal as efficiently as troll skin. Either that, or Dave's been hurt almost to the point of dying, over and over again. 

 You don't want to believe that, but you could—Dave looks and talks tough, seems cool and polished, but when he lets his guard fall, he's so fractured and fragile that it hurts your fucking heart. He's like no one you know; if he'd been a troll, he would have either been culled by now or been selected to train as an elite soldier. You'd like to believe the latter, but you honestly don't know. 

 And he's not a troll, anyway. He's human, uniquely beautiful and alien, different from you and from everyone you've always known. He is like a reflection of yourself in a cracked mirror, like the other half of everything you are. 

 You're barely awake, at this point. The realization alone should be enough to banish sleep, but all you can find the energy to do is mutter, "Fuck it," and squirm a little closer to Dave. 

 His skin is cooler than yours, you think as you close your eyes. Like a highblood's, or maybe not a highblood...Terezi? Equius? Not Gamzee, if you remember right (which you might not; it's been so long since you've touched Gamzee, and that though brings a pang of guilt), warmer than Gamzee's skin but only by a little...

 You're still contemplating blood tempature when you fall asleep. 

 Sleep is as big a mistake as you knew it would be, fraught with blood like a liquid rainbow, pain that's only a shadow of what pain can be but still hurts like fuck, memories that are undeniably your own (no matter how much you'd like to deny them) and memories that are hellishly familiar and yet bewilderingly not-yours. Part of the time you know that you're dreaming, but you still can't force yourself awake. 

 When you do finally wake up, you do it with a stifled whimper, your hands closing convulsively on—

 Flesh. Dave's shoulders. At some point, you moved even closer to him, draping yourself over him and curling against him, and now you're pretty fucking sure you just drove your fingernails deep enough into his skin to draw blood. And you're still in the grip of the nightmare, unable to breathe deep enough to apologise, unable to do anything other than shake and cling to him. 

 "Bad dream?" Dave's whisper is barely loud enough to be heard over your own heartbeat. "I know how that is." 

 You breath as deeply as you can, shedding some measure of the unreasoning fear, growl, "I'm fucking fine," and immediately regret saying it. 

 Dave is silent for a second. "Fine," he replies, thoughtfully. "I know I'm not fine, and I don't think you are, either. Not really. But that's okay." One of his hands comes up, stroking your hair but staying well clear of your horns—even though he's not troll, he seems to get that there are times when horns can be touched and times that they definitely should not be. "Right?" 

 You can feel the vibration that'll become a purr starting in your chest, and it makes you feel even more ashamed for snapping at him. "I'm sorry," you mutter. 

 Dave considers that for another long moment, fingers combing absently through your hair. When he speaks again, it's not in a whisper but in a low voice that has a cadence that you've heard from him before, when he's rapping with someone else. "So fine my line between loving and dying, in the nick of time you arrive and you strive to keep me alive, don't let me take a dive, you know you saved my life, broke me out of my strife, brought me relief and taught me belief with the words that you weave—" He runs out of breath, inhales sharply, and keeps going, although his voice goes a bit hoarser with every word, "Karkat, please don't leave, you're what I need and without you I'd bleed: words, blood, and pain, colder than death's reign, I would go insane, you're all that can tame the storm in my brain—" 

 Dave's voice cracks, and he stops rapping. You can hear his breathing, though, ragged and uneven, as he fights not to cry. 

 "Fuck," you say softly. You can feel your own tears on your face. "Oh, fuck, Dave, fucking..." There are no words, nothing you can find to say, so instead you reach out in the dark, finding Dave's face and wiping tears away as gently as you can. You're so bad at this, always have been, and you're afraid that you'll do something to hurt him worse as you try to comfort him. 

 Without even thinking, you run one hand through his hair, feeling for horns and not finding any. Dave sighs shakily as you mentally curse yourself. 

 "Don't leave me," he says quietly, and his voice breaks again on the second word. "Please—" 

 "You're fucking kidding me." You lean forward, pressing your lips against his forehead for a brief second. "I'd rather cut off my right hand than leave you alone, Strider, and don't you fucking forget it." 

 He exhales sharply, a gasp turned inside out, and pulls you down just a little, just enough that your mouth meets his. This kiss is even better than the first time, if that's possible. It lasts what seems like forever and like no time at all, and this time Dave's the one who breaks it. 

 "Are we—are we still on 'no pailing?'" he asks, and you can hear a wicked smile in his voice. "Because if we are, I might be about to have a problem—" 

 "Fuck that," you tell him, and find his mouth with your own again. 

 And he is smiling, and you swear on your soul that you won't ever let him stop.


End file.
